These have absolutely no meaning at the start of a conversation. Think of them like processor registers.

You can assign them using the word "goi". For example, if you wanted to make my name shorter because you were going to say it a lot, you could say "la benlubar. goi ko'a" to store "that-named ben lubar" as the current value of ko'a.

Lojban pronouns work for absolutely anything, not just people. You can say "le djazarci goi ko'e" to make ko'e mean "the grocery store".

If you run out of pronouns, you can also use initials or names the same way. This also allows you to use non-lojban genders to refer to people. For example:

"la olivias. goi la xir." - the name "xir" now refers to someone named Olivia.

Note that in the latter case, the word you use has to follow lojban cmene (name) spelling rules, which makes most common English pronouns impossible (h is not allowed to be next to a consonant and the word must not end in a vowel).

Although this *can* be used to give people their prefered pronouns, it does not imply that that's what's happening.

I could just as easily have said "goi la sam." when referring to either of these women and it would only mean "I am using the word 'Sam' to refer to this woman right now." It doesn't imply that the woman is actually named Sam, or that anyone involved in the conversation usually calls her Sam. goi simply replaces the meaning of whatever is said after it with the meaning of whatever was said before it until the conversation ends or the word's meaning is changed again.

Now that we've covered pronouns, how about pro-verbs? (I'm adding a hyphen to make sure people don't misread the last word of the sentence as "hymns".)

lojban has five pro-verbs:

broda, brode, brodi, brodo, brodu

You can assign values to these using "cei". lojban verbs work like programming functions, taking a specific type of information in each of a specific type of slots. When you assign a verb to one of the five brod* pro-verbs, you also copy all the values you gave to that function.

"mi klama cei broda le zarci"This means "I go to the store", but it also saves "I go to the store" as the value of broda.

If I follow that with ".i do broda", that means "you go to the store", because mi (I) was replaced with do (you), but "the store" is not modified.

bestoSomeone dons a metaphorical asbestos suit to guard against flames on a topic from someone else, who disagrees with a post for a reason, not realizing that the post was meant to be sent to a third person rather than the jboste mailing list where it was posted in response to an email, whose author wishes the grammatical class used for swapping placeholders in lojban words were extended to concisely express a specific place of the verb "besto" which has some place structure and too many places because of an unspecified sadistic whim of the verb maker, who also created another unspecified verb which has a place structure, and so winds up using too many of the lojban word "zi'o" (which removes a placeholder from a verb) in order to make the word "besto" more usable by some standard and wishes they had never heard of the word besto for an unspecified reason, not realizing for another unspecified reason that it was suggested sarcastically due to the boredom of a person, who is proposing it against better judgement because it is fun by some standard, but still wishes it had as many places as the lojban word "du" (the lojban word denoting identical equality of an arbitrary number of placeholders) for yet another unspecified reason, and feels like throwing in an epistemology sumti, because he/she knows both that "besto" has its place structure defined by a run-on sentence (you can guess which one) and that epistemology sumti are used in a gismu by an epistemology, notwithstanding the fact that someone actually has a use for besto placeholders 1 through 7 and wishes this weren't an extremely long and stupid joke, longer than an unspecified joke and stupider than another unspecified joke but still appreciated by someone - a fact which says something about them in the opinion of someone else - but not seen as even remotely amusing by yet another person, who is aware that an as-yet unmentioned person has a use for the gismu besto because of a reason.